Learning From Sandy Hook: A Plea For Sensible Gun Regulation

James Marshall Crotty
, ContributorI cover education as a sector and as the bedrock of all sectors.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

NEWTOWN, CT - DECEMBER 18: Children return to school on December 18, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. Four days after 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, most students in Newtown returned to school. Children at Sandy Hook Elementary will attend a school in a neighboring town until authorities decide whether or not to reopen Sandy Hook. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Now that several days have passed -- and the usual suspects have piped in with their disaster tourism, media opportunism, and inevitable bombast – do I feel comfortable writing publicly about the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy.

Sadly, even with important-sounding calls for change, I’m not sure much will change, even after another disaffected young man, with easy access to weapons of war, left a trail of human carnage in a desperate last-ditch attempt for recognition and ideation. Yes, nonstop news coverage, incessant hand-wringing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) reintroduction of the exception-riddled 1994 Federal Assault Weapons ban, plus President Obama's moving call for "change" at Sunday night’s interfaith vigil for Sandy Hook victims suggest this might be a “turning point.”

However, a turning point in red state America? In rural America? The "unprecedented" spike in gun sales since the Sandy Hook tragedy -- including at ArmsX, which sits a short 20 miles from Sandy Hook Elementary -- suggests that not much has changed in gun-owning circles. In most non-urban counties in this country – which vote overwhelmingly along NRA lines in state, local, and national elections -- citizens seem to unconsciously accept that horrific mass killings are the price we pay for unbridled gun ownership.

To understand the genesis of that POV, one needs to grasp how guns are woven into our republic’s founding. Our second amendment was largely created to enable citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. Not symbolically defend, but literally defend. As the nation’s law enforcement has expanded its weapons capabilities, so too, by virtue of the "natural rights" enshrined in the second amendment, should the weapons capabilities of citizens.

However, tyranny’s definition has been distorted far beyond what the founding fathers intended. They did not intend for U.S. citizens to take up arms against their government because they disagreed with, say, high taxes, quotas, wealth redistribution, or amnesty for illegal immigrants. As onerous as those positions may be to some, they do not justify armed revolt. The founders intended civilians to protect themselves against a government that was literally waging violent war on them.

Even as I consider taking up hunting -- out of a desire to procure my own food, not for sport or security -- I am struck by the absurdity of owning a semi-automatic weapon. It serves no sport or hunting function. It is not necessary in most cases of self-defense. One owns a semi-automatic weapon almost exclusively to protect oneself should the U.S. government wage war on its citizens. Alternatively, one requires a semi-automatic weapon should another nation invade the U.S. and our security forces are unable to repel the intruder. Neither event is remotely probable in 2012 America. Nevertheless, American citizens can purchase unabashed weapons of war -- such as the Bushmaster .223 rifle used to mow down 20 Sandy Hook first-graders -- purely as a bulwark against these imagined tyrannical threats.

As we try to forge a new way after the Newtown tragedy, those who believe in hunting’s import need to stand up against the extremism on both sides of the gun issue. Bans on automatic or semi-automatic weapons will not in any way affect the sport of hunting. Mandating gun show background checks (however small the purchase), or requiring that one keeps one’s guns under lock and key in a place impenetrable to outsiders and one’s own children, are not too burdensome to those of us who merely seek to hunt for sport, sustenance, habitat protection, or all three.

Yes, as John Lott argues in More Guns Less Crime, mass murderers pick schools, in part, because they are largely defenseless targets. However, arming teachers and principals, as former Education Secretary Bill Bennett recommended Sunday on "Meet the Press," will turn our schools into mini-prisons. In many parts of the country – as documentary filmmaker Cevin Soling notes in “The War On Kids” -- they already are. In my next post, I will explore ways to effectively protect schools without turning them into fortresses.

For now, we are going to have to forego this illusion that U.S. citizens should be free to arm themselves with military-style rifles, high-capacity magazines, explosives, and more. A fulsomely armed citizenry might be what the founding fathers had in mind in the context of a low-tech colonial war with the British back in 1776, but not in the world of today’s high-tech killing machines and droves of lost and systemically emasculated young men with access to such weaponry.

Just as we’ve had to accept limitations on state rights in order to enable civil rights for African-Americans, women, and now gays, so too we need to pass laws that unequivocally preserve the second amendment’s right to bear arms, but circumscribe its purview when it comes to self-defense.

As New York City has empirically shown – much to the consternation of faddish economists like Steven D. Levitt (he of “Freaknomics” fame) --- gun regulation, when combined with smart, robust policing and James Q. Wilson's Broken Windows approach to law enforcement, works. New York City has routinely had the lowest per capita murder rate in the nation for several decades. We need to replicate New York City’s practices in full across the nation and give up this outdated canard that dramatically arming citizens is going to solve crime in places like DC, Chicago or Newtown, Connecticut. It can’t. It hasn’t. It won’t.

Nor is it feasible or ethical to keep whole swaths of the population deemed “mentally ill” from owning guns. After all, a healthy plurality of American gun owners likely suffers from some mental impairment: depression, anxiety, PTSD from serving in military conflict, ADD, drug, alcohol, and/or gambling addiction, and, of course, sundry types of oppositional or anti-social behavior. In addition, I am sure many gun owners have expressed viewpoints online that might be deemed “inappropriate” or “dangerous” by one quarter or another. Nevertheless, the MacArthur Foundation found that those who were diagnosed mentally ill were no more violent than those who were not diagnosed mentally ill.

In our quest to keep guns away from the so-called “mentally ill,” are we going to ferret out the medical records – in direct violation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule -- of the millions of Americans on psychiatric meds or the millions more who had to spend time in a mental health facility because their own caregivers were drunks, drug addicts, abusers or all three?

Such draconian personal invasions under the guise of “mental health” are positively Soviet (the U.S.S.R. made a habit of locking up citizens in psychiatric wards for opposing its totalitarian policies). Absent a clear and reasonable bright line that miraculously demarcates which mental conditions lead to gun violence -- Asperger's Syndrome is typically not one -- such psychiatric litmus tests absurdly infringe upon the basic freedoms of all Americans, including the freedom of speech. We must strongly resist this post-Sandy-Hook mental health detection drumbeat precisely because it will ensnare millions of innocent young Americans in its altruistic trap.

Instead, we must strike a healthy balance between rights and responsibilities without demonizing a large swath of the citizenry in the process. It will require give and take from all of us. In addition, it will require sensible sportsmen to stand up and differentiate themselves from the Prepper fringe – the Sandy Hook shooter’s mother was a member -- who are animating the unreasonable resistance to balanced gun regulation.

Yes, cars kill more people every year in America than do guns. However, the primary purpose of cars is transport. The primary purpose of guns is killing. A wise society should be able to navigate that distinction.

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